Devil; or, That'll Do, Shyamalan. That'll do.

     Few writer/directors have gone from Hollywood golden boy to easy punchline quite as quickly as M Night Shyamalan. After a few little-seen early works he exploded to prominence with 1999's The Sixth Sense, a film I confess was ruined for me when somebody revealed the big twist before I actually saw it. He followed it up just a year later with Unbreakable, a nicely paced riff on the superhero genre, then the blink-and-you'll-miss-them alien invasion drama Signs two years after that. Critics lauded him as the new Hitchcock, praising his ability to build tension and atmosphere. And then something weird happened. Shyamalan just stopped making good movies. 2004's The Village was widely met with negative reviews, as was Lady In The Water, a film based on a bedtime story in which he cast himself as a man who's basically the second coming of Christ. Stories about his overblown ego were rampant. After producing two of the biggest flops of the last ten years, the "trees are the bad guy" snoozefest The Happening and The Last Airbender, an ill-advised adaptation of the brilliant Nickelodeon series, it seemed his reputation was irreparably harmed. His latest project, titled Devil and based on a story he wrote (but not actually written or directed by him), by no means redeems his image, but it certainly isn't doing any more harm.

     So here's the story; five strangers (Bokeem Woodbine, Jenny O'Hara, Geoffrey Arend, Logan Marshall-Green, and Bojana Novakovic) get on an elevator, which promptly stalls, trapping them between floors. The already uncomfortable situation only gets worse when the lights start to flicker on and off. We're told by our friendly narrator, an ultra-religious security guard played by Jacob Vargas, that the Devil is now among them in human form and plans to torture the other four before taking them to hell. The passengers begin slowly dying one by one, whittling down the suspect list, as Chris Messina's atheist cop tries to make sense of the whole ordeal.

     First the good news: Devil is actually a nice little thriller. It's fairly well-paced, never seeming to drag (at a svelt 80 minutes, how could it?) and has some fun little jolts every now and then. The attack scenes are all done in complete darkness, and we can only hear the violence. IT does a good job of creating dread. Shyamalan has shown a frankly amazing lack of ego by allowing other writers and directors near his ideas, and it's apparently paid off. John Erick Dowdle's direction is actually pretty decent, and Brian Nelson's script, though a bit clunky at times, is perfectly serviceable. The acting is fine all-around. The movie is just aggressively mediocre, which is nothing to complain about. Mediocre is actually good for Hollywood, compared to some of the other dreck in theaters recently.

     And the bad news: Devil is by no means a great movie. It's just sorta good. The characters are all one-note stereotypes (bitchy chick, old lady, mysterious drifter, angry black guy, annoying "comedy relief") so it's hard to really care when they start dying. Sure, Hitchcock admittedly used character archetypes rather than actual characters, but no one involved in this production is Hitchcock. Also, Messina's character provides so many red herrings you'd think he was a communist fish salesman (what?). He stomps around from room to room insisting one of the people in the elevator must have some sort of rational motive for murdering everyone else, and his investigation scenes would actually be pretty interesting if we weren't blatantly told one of these people is just the Devil. I get that he refuses to believe something supernatural is happening, but we, the audience, know it is, so while his investigations drop a few interesting tidbits of exposition and back-story they're still utterly pointless. There must be an easier way to convey back-story and exposition. Like maybe having the characters say it themselves.

     All in all, Devil doesn't suck. It's competently directed, written and acted. I can't help but wish for more, though. Shyamalan still hasn't found what once made him great, but he definitely seems to be on the way back.

Rating: 7/10